Career perspective: Victor A. Convertino

Abstract

This review focuses on a career of unique opportunities to participate in various areas of research related to extreme physiology and medicine. My experience as a volunteer subject in exercise experiments conducted at NASA included the study of acute and chronic physiological responses and adaptations to exercise in environments of hypoxia, heat stress, and simulated microgravity (bed rest), and eventually to my doctoral work on mechanisms underlying expansion of plasma and blood volume with acute and repeated exercise and heat exposure. My career has taken me to research positions at NASA, the Stanford University School of Medicine, the University of Arizona, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory before assuming my present location at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research. As a result of these multiple experiences across a period of 45 years, I have had opportunities to translate basic research to astronauts, high-performance aircraft pilots, and critically ill patients who are challenged by conditions of extreme physiology and medicine.

Keywords: Bed rest; Blood volume; Compensatory reserve; Exercise; Heat acclimation; Hemorrhage; Intrathoracic pressure regulation; Lower body negative pressure; Medical monitoring; Space.

Fig. 1

Expired air collection from subject Convertino into a tissot tank during metabolic experiments conducted in the summer of 1970 at the Laboratory of Human Environmental Physiology at NASA’s Ames Research Center

Fig. 2

Human volunteer Convertino donning an early prototype for testing of a liquid cooling garment (LCG) developed for use by astronauts for thermoregulation during extravehicular activities in the summer of 1978 at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The late Dr. Alan Chambers, former Chief of the Man-Vehicle Systems Research Division and Director of Space Research, is instrumenting Convertino

Fig. 3

Convertino performing operational tests on an impermeable ensemble during rest (left panel) and physical exercise (right panel) conducted in the summer of 1988 in the Human Physiology Laboratory at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center

Fig. 4

25 s of ‘weightlessness’ produced by ascent followed by rapid descent of NASA’s KC-135 aircraft (left panels). Convertino floating in microgravity (free fall) performed during January 1993 (right panel)

Fig. 5

Vic Convertino undergoing a simulation of hemorrhage in the LBNP chamber during a 2006 experiment. Dr. Caroline Rickards, NRC post-doctoral fellow, is applying intrathoracic pressure regulation therapy with an impedance threshold device

Fig. 6

Vic Convertino, Keith Lurie, Don Doerr, and Ahamed Idris receiving their medals while attending the Space Technology Hall of Fame Induction ceremony at Colorado Springs, Colorado on April 10, 2008